The group says it disavows conspiracy theories, though founder Tim Ballard was criticized for refusing to condemn the
QAnon conspiracy theory.
[45][46][47]
A September 2020
Vice News article called O.U.R. a "
QAnon-adjacent charity," and said the "organization has embraced followers of that particular baseless conspiracy theory, rather than condemning it the way that other anti-trafficking charities have"—even though the organization claims no association with the group, and its website "vaguely disavows conspiracy theories." The Vice article quoted Ballard telling
The New York Times a month prior, "Some of these theories have allowed people to open their eyes. So now it's our job to flood the space with real information so the facts can be shared." A spokesperson for O.U.R told
Vice that they're "not affiliated with the group QAnon in any way, shape or form, and to date we have had no interaction with them."
[45][46][47]
In a December 2020 article,
Vice News said that Tim Ballard embellished O.U.R.'s role in the rescue of a trafficked woman, stating that they did not find "outright falsehoods but a pattern of image-burnishing and mythology-building, a series of exaggerations that are, in the aggregate, quite misleading".
[1]
A 2021 follow-up article further criticized O.U.R.'s practices, including using inexperienced donors and celebrities as part of its jump team, a lack of meaningful surveillance or identification of targets, failing to validate whether the people they intended to rescue were in fact actual trafficking victims, and conflating consensual
sex work with sex trafficking.
[48]
A 2021 article in
Slate criticized an armed 2014 raid conducted by O.U.R. in the Dominican Republic, which was filmed live by a camera crew to use in a proposed reality TV show, saying that it was likely to have traumatized the trafficked children.
[3] Anne Gallagher, "the leading global expert on the international law on human trafficking",
[49] wrote in 2015 that O.U.R. had an "alarming lack of understanding about how sophisticated criminal trafficking networks must be approached and dismantled" and called the work of O.U.R "arrogant, unethical and illegal".
[3][50]
In 2022, the O.U.R. falsely claimed that it had entered a partnership with
American Airlines.
[51]
Tim Ballard and Katherine, his wife, have nine children, ages 23 to 6.
[52] Two children, sold to Ballard, in a sting operation, in Haiti, were adopted by Tim Ballard.
[52]